Tracks | Saluting country music's outlaws

6:53 PM,
Sep. 27, 2012

Johnny Berry

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Johnny Berry grew up listening to outlaw country music at his daddy's side in Flaherty, Ky. In the mid-1970s, this is what you did.

Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson were on the radio all day long, long-haired and wild-eyed but still resolutely country. It made an impression on Berry, who has been Louisville's finest honky-tonk hero for going on a decade, but not just because of the songs.

"It's the smell of my dad's garage when those songs was playing, and being behind the daggone tractor with the radio playing and hearing 'Luckenbach, Texas,' " he said. "It's that kind of thing. Their music was ...